World’s Biggest Computing Cloud is controlled by Cyber-crooks

According to Senior Vice-President and Senior Technologist Rodney Joffe at Neustar, an infrastructure services company, the world's largest 'cloud computing' is under the control of cyber-criminals, as reported by Psfk.com on April 19, 2010.

The announcement comes as Joffe made a presentation at the Santa Clara, California, US-based Cloud Connect Conference during the third week of April 2010. In his presentation, Joffe exemplified the risks from Conficker as well as the way it imposes a threat on genuine providers of cloud computing.

According to the technologist, the notorious Conficker worm controls 6.4 Million PCs across 230 countries at 230 TLD (top level domains) worldwide, over 18m CPUs and uses 28 Terabits/sec of Internet connectivity.

He further says that just like genuine providers of cloud computing, Conficker can be hired almost at any place on the globe that a user may desire his cloud to run from. Borrowers of Conficker can decide on what volume of Internet connectivity they desire, what type of OS would suit them and more.

Various options also exist that customers can choose from regarding the services they want in their Conficker cloud. The services can be sending spam, launching a denial-of-service assault, distributing malware, hacking into computers, or stealing money and personal information. Put differently, the cloud is actually mobbed up.

Resultantly, based on the presentation given by the technologist, another security company Spectre Group states that as against the Conficker Cloud, genuine market players are much fewer in number. Consequently, there arise some fundamental statistical figures to compare.

For example, Google, the largest genuine cloud service vendor, consists of 500,000 systems, has 1 Million CPUs and provides 1,500 GB/sec of Internet connectivity. At the second spot is Amazon, with 160,000 systems, 320,000 CPUs and 400 GB/sec of Internet connectivity, while Rackspace on No.3 offers 65,000 systems, 130,000 CPUs and 300GB/sec of Internet connectivity.

Thus, the Conficker Cloud exhibits certain illusions, which must be thought of while considering cloud computing. Thus, it isn't merely the risk associated with a virus infecting a computer. It is the risk associated with another PC getting added to the criminal business. as several security companies anticipated at the beginning of this year, cloud computing service is gradually getting gloomy and unclear.